Comment by jjani 4 days ago
I never understood why they became less popular when mobile phones took over. Even in the 00s so many people were already in group chats through MSN, ICQ and so on.
All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app. Instead they wasted billions on Skype to replace their golden opportunity.
This is actually one of the great entrepreneurship lessons of my career, which I think about a lot.
Around 2009, as smart phones were on their exponential leg up, and when I was still pretty new in the workplace, I remember thinking (and talking with my coworkers) about how messaging and chat rooms were really well suited to the technology landscape. But I lamented "too bad the space is already too crowded with options for anyone to use anything new.
But all of today's major messaging successes became household names after that! What I learned from this is that I have a tendency to think that trends are played out already, when actually I'm early in the adoption curve.
Heh, this reminds me of a vaguely related lesson I learned recently. Sold Nvidia mid-2023. "Surely everyone understands by now just how much money they're going to be making the coming 2 years, and this is already completely priced in, it's so blatantly obvious!". Heh.
Ha, someone who has money to invest asked me about an investment thesis at the end of 2022 related to the release of chatgpt. I said nvidia seemed like the most clearly likely to benefit in terms of public equities, but he said no way, it was already overpriced. :shrug:
Everything hypey overshoots eventually, but nobody knows exactly when!
I think those networks never figured out how to make money off of it. Without the tracking (and piles of VC cash) that modern social media got, the ads were not worth enough. Microsoft and AOL just saw them as cost centers so when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols they saw no value in investing in rewriting everything.
Piles of VC cash were never necessary, FWIW. Tracking, potentially. They may indeed have massively undervalued ads, or even other monetization options - Line makes millions off of emojis and such, and if they'd have been as big as Whatsapp, possibly billions. Meta too is not even tapping 5% of Whatsapp's monetization potential, FWIW. I wonder if it's intentional to prevent anti-trust concerns.
But I don't think monetization matters too much. Ms tried making the botched Skype play, and as a company there's no way they didn't understand the value of hundreds of millions of eyeballs, daily usage market share. They understood that with IE, despite it being a zero-revenue product in and of itself.
> when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols
You may know more about this then I do - what's the main difference? I used them back in the day and as end-user they felt the exact same as modern messaging apps. I send a message, it gets saved on some server, the receiver gets it from there. When I used it, it definitely didn't require both parties to be online to send/receive.
Or is it about the notifications?
Wasn't Skype a proper mobile app decently early ?
The core issue was of course being a second class citizen on iOS, using a Skype phone number purely on mobile was real PITA for instance.
Personally I put a lot more blame on Google for everything they did on the messaging front.
I remember using a lot of very low quality, buggy Skype apps on mobile over the years. I don't think it ever approached desktop quality.
To be honest it didn't even work great on laptops that got turned on and off or went in and out of connectivity. The networking piece seemed designed for an always on desktop.
And let's be honest here, Skype on desktop was also quite shitty.
Feels like it went myspace -> facebook -> snapchat and never went back to such "public profile" ideals and stayed in chat apps. When I was in college in the early '10's, it seemed like everyone was obsessed with the "temporary chat" idea and actually believed that you could guarantee a message or picture could be temporary.
Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly.
Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.
IIRC one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun, which was a technical challenge back in the day.
These days the field is much narrower but 10+ years ago finding an app that supported everyone's device was a challenge.
> one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun
Not really. There's still no iPad version.
My friend installed Whatsapp from the App Store for their iPad, to find it didn't behave quite as expected, and didn't match their phone and desktop experience.
That turned out to be because it was an app from some random third party with its own features. It used Whatsapp in the name, and had a similar logo.
When my friend realised they were unexpectedly using a third party app, from a provider they'd never heard of, they were worried they'd accidentally given away access to their account full of sensitive messages to someone they didn't trust.
I was surprised my cautious friend would install the wrong app by mistake, as the Apple app store is normally good for well known services.
While scrolling through Whatsapp apps, it took me a while to realise the top search result, which my friend had installed, wasn't actually from Whatsapp (but looked similar). Even though the logo was a little different, I assumed that was just a quirk. It's just so unexpected to find that what you get on iPad isn't the real thing, when searching for Whatsapp gets you the real thing if you're looking from an iPad or Mac.
>?All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app.
I begged Microsoft to make MSN on Windows Mobile and later on Android or iPhone.
They just dont get it nor do they care. Whatsapp wasn't even a thing on Smartphone. Its dominance came a little later.
And without a smartphone or mobile network, people keep in contact especially those not in close group via Social Media aka MySpace and Facebook or Friendster.
Now smartphone ubiquitous in most places. The contact list has taken over. Social Media became a news feed.